Inbound Marketing: Bring Your Potential Customers to You

Modern content marketing techniques such as Inbound Marketing is growing in popularity while cold calls, direct mail, and spamming email are now considered ineffective sales tools. Inbound Marketing is a term used to describe the collective efforts of blogging, SEO/SEM, and social media. You'll know you have an effective Inbound Marketing program when your leads start coming to you. Here are a few good ways to make that happen.

From a top-level perspective, you'll want your marketing content to position your company/product/service as an expert consultant and not a salesperson. You'll want to generate content that provides insight and guidance in a non-threatening manner. When you do this, you'll draw potential customers to initiate contact with you rather than you calling them. Your customers will find you through your blog posts, social media, and Google searches, which is what makes SEO and an SEM such an important part of the equation.

As an expert consultant, you will take the time to learn your potential customers pain points and why they would want your services or products. Your blog and social media posts should discuss those pain points in a manner that shows you understand the problem; and then conclude your content with possible solutions that your company can provide to heal their pain, solve their problem, and help them do their job better. You'll want your content to be friendly, confident, and knowledgeable. By doing this, you will establish trust with your potential customers as you are someone who can help them, not sell to them.

At a more granular level, you'll want to write blog posts, but that's only the beginning. After you write an introductory post on how your service can help solve pain points, you'll want to turn that post into a video, an infographic, a webinar, and eventually case studies and white papers. And then rinse and repeat that cycle of content repurposing for each of your verticals or business segments.

After creating and posting on your site (and optimizing your content for SEO), you'll want to post it where your customers are, for example, if you're B2C, you might want to focus on Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Twitter; for B2B, you might focus on LinkedIn as well as Facebook and the others.

As you start to attract potential visitors to your social media sites and your company site, you'll want to start collecting information from them so you can stay in touch. A simple way of doing that is asking for a visitor's email address so you can answer questions, keep in touch through a newsletter, or you can follow up with additional information. A good CRM is necessary here. Depending on how large (or small) your staff is or what stage your company is in, you could use anything from MailChimp to HubSpot to Marketo to Salesforce or any combination.

To effectively put together a solid Inbound Marketing plan, you will need several people involved, including: a writer, an editor, a videographer, a graphic designer, a social media expert and a CRM expert. You could hire an agency to do all of this work for you, but for larger companies or start ups that are ramping up, hiring and building your own content marketing team could make the difference between you and the competition. If you do prefer to keep your marketing efforts in-house, you'll need a professional with experience in all of these areas who can direct a team to create great, lead-generating content that brings the customer to you.